Saturday, January 04, 2014

In our first installment of the XHouse1 First Build series we recounted the background of MJ, our customer and future XHouse1 Owner. Cold weather has delayed progress in the construction so today I'll just recount the timeline. In 2009 they had purchased Design Prints a few months after the design was posted to the catalog.

foundation walls finished at the Indiana XHouse1 site

At that time I thought I'd have the Construction Prints for this design done in the next 6 months or so. As often happens it did not go that way. Instead I focused on filling out the XHouse collection with new designs. The XHouse2 and XHouse3 were concieved. A renovation and re-launch of our catalog web site took place. And that spread to the other branches of the lamidesign.com web site as well. We followed on that with more new designs, the Lagom House in several variations. And Construction Prints of several of the prior designs in the XHouse collection. Admittedly we were neglecting the development of the Construction Prints for the XHouse1. At the time I was very focused on completing designs that were smaller, and aimed at small developers.

In the meantime MJ's pledge to return for Construction Prints in 2010 did not materialize. That was not unusual. Many Design Print customers do not develop into Construction Print customers. So despite our promising dialog I was not discouraged that MJ had seemed to disappear. Then we corresponded again at the beginning of 2011 with the plan to launch the project that year. However it was 2013, 2 1/2 years later when we touched base again. MJ's current house was actually on the market and the project was beginning for real.

I'd like to tell you all that customer's plans to build always fall together flawlessly, and that building a house is easy. But its better to understand that the process is not simple and there are many steps. You should know that its easy for other parts of your life to intervene and extend the time frame of your project. Its not unusual for a customers project to take several years. Everybody's circumstances are different, but what all my customer's have had in common was a commitment to building a modern home that reflected their values and the way they wanted to live. In the end that commitment is what drove their houses to completion.

So now it began. A series of balls were tossed in the air, all of which needed to land in the right place in the correct order! Please come back to follow the story.